


Deadly Nightshade

by alouette_des_champs



Series: Youth of the Nation [4]
Category: NADDPOD - Fandom, Not Another D&D Podcast (Podcast)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Cheating, Drug Addiction, F/M, Families of Choice, Friendship, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Infidelity, M/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-10-24 23:38:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20714459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alouette_des_champs/pseuds/alouette_des_champs
Summary: What Moonshine doesn’t know won’t kill her. Interludes are for the boys.





	Deadly Nightshade

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I might be missing some stuff by just focusing on Moonshine's perspective, thus this manly interlude was born. My drug/demon metaphors still refuse to quit, and wait, what’s this…a sex/demon metaphor?! It’s getting complicated, ya’ll. This one also has a higher rating because it gets incredibly grim in the middle there. 
> 
> I usually don't include music, but these two very emo songs were I N T E G R A L to me writing this fic, so credit where credit's due.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9kqvXX4YkA  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMXi4HvC7VQ

Hardwon Surefoot was on his own. He had always been on his own.

Now that he was an adult, he saw his Uncle Red once a month; the guy bought him a beer, told him a couple of war stories, then headed out after about half an hour. Red was the man Hardwon’s father had designated in his will to take care of his only child in the event that both he and his wife died, a challenge Red had responded to by immediately handing baby Hardwon over to children’s services, never to see or speak to him again until his eighteenth birthday.

“You didn’t want me as your dad, kid,” he always said, spitting brown chaw out of the corner of his mouth into a plastic bottle. “I live by myself in a trailer park. Work in a salvage yard. Spend all my nights at the bar. It’s no place for a kid.”

_It would have been something,_ Hardwon wanted to say. _Better than the fucking nothing I got._ But he just would just nod in understanding and agreement and clink their bottles together. It wasn’t worth starting a fight over, because like it or not, he was used to it.

Other than Red, he had been pretty much shit out of luck for most of his adult life. The people he had grown up running around with, Gemma and Jaina and even their shithead cousin Rust, had all wandered off to do their own thing. After a few months of college, Gemma had broken up with him over the phone. She’d sounded totally out of it—drunk, probably—and she’d slurred through something unconvincing about focusing on her schoolwork. They both knew the real reason: she was tired of fighting about it with her dad, and now that she had some physical and emotional distance from the relationship, she could finally bring herself to end it and give them all a break from the constant conflict.

Obviously, he had been pissed off about it for a long time. He’d started with the drugs—well, more drugs than usual, anyway. Spent a couple of nights in jail. He was doing nothing and going nowhere, just as poor and as fucked up as he had always been. When he’d met Bev and Moonshine, he had been pretty close to rock bottom. Hardwon Surefoot might have been on his own, but after that, at least he wasn’t alone. He’d never known anyone like either of them before. He was constantly surprised by how reliable they were, how much they really seemed to care about him. He would never be able to verbalize it, not even if he had been comfortable enough with his own masculinity to try, but being around them had made him a better person.

One time, just a couple of months into their friendship, he had spent a couple of hellish days in withdrawal, shaking and sweating in bed. He had one very vivid memory that cut through the haze: Moonshine sitting on the edge of his bed, holding out a glass of water.

“You’re tougher than this thing,” she’d murmured, smoothing his damp hair away from his face with her cool, strong hand. “I know you are.” Naturally, he’d pretended he didn’t remember afterward, but he held onto that moment. He was at least smart enough to know that he needed to protect the relationship he had with the two of them no matter what, because it was hands down the best thing he was ever going to have.

One of the many downsides of being generally uneducated and unmotivated was how many late nights he had to work. By the time Hardwon crawled out of bed and shoved his shit into a duffel bag, Moonshine and Bev were already deep into their daily shenanigans. Today, they were both sitting cross-legged on the living room floor. She was holding an apple and a sewing needle on either side of his left earlobe.

“Hold still,” she said, lining the needle up with a little black dot she had made. “It’ll be so quick you won’t even feel it. Promise.”

“You’ve done this before, right?”

“Lots of times.” Before Bev had a chance to protest any further, she shoved the needle through his earlobe and into the apple.

“Shit!” he yelped.

“Gimme the ring.” She let go of the needle to flap her free hand at him demandingly, and he deposited a small silver ring into her palm. In one smooth move, she popped the needle out and the earring in.

“You look goddamn cool!” Moonshine crowed, obviously proud of her own handiwork. She shot a sly look at Hardwon, who already had his hand on the doorknob. “You next, big guy?”

“Oh, hell no.”

“C’mon! You’d look like a pirate.” She wiggled the needle at him. “Scare of a lil’ pinch?” He glanced at Bev, whose eyes were still watering profusely. It was very hard to say no to Moonshine. He had already let her give him jailhouse tattoos on more than one occasion, something she had pulled off with a surprising finesse and very little blood, but ear-piercing was a whole different game.

“I just don’t want to look too much like Dog the Bounty Hunter when I get old.”

She narrowed her eyes at him as if she was trying to picture it. Slowly, she nodded. “Ya know what? That’s fair.”

Hardwon rolled his eyes. “See you two maniacs later.”

He lifted weights and ran pretty much every day, but once or twice a week, he hit the boxing gym with Ulfgar. Their workouts tended to play out like some sort of frenetic _Rocky_ montage. They warmed up with enough push-ups, crunches, squats, and weighted jump-roping to kill a normal man, and then they started punching things. Bags, pads, each other…it didn’t really matter, just as long as they didn’t stop punching until they were both too tired to punch anymore.

When it was Hardwon’s turn to put the pads on his hands for his sparring buddy, he could not help but notice the furious expression of determination on the other man’s face. Normally, punching had a more calming effect on the older man, but today it just seemed to be revving him up even more.

“You seem, uh…” He paused, searching for neutral phrasing. “Angrier than usual.” And he was usually pretty damn angry. Ulfgar was the only person he knew who could make Hardwon look emotionally stable by comparison.

“It’s over, man.” _Thud._ Ulfgar laid a punch into the pad that actually made Hardwon’s hand go a little bit numb.

“What’s over?” _Thud._ His teeth rattled.

“Me and Alanis.” _Thud._ He tried his best to pretend that he hadn’t almost stumbled backwards.

“I didn’t know it had…started.” Ulfgar’s group of friends was even weirder and more complicated than his own. Alanis was some sort of stoner savant who was getting her grad degree in something nobody else understood. Thiala always seemed to be in the middle of a mental breakdown that she was trying to treat with a combination of crystal healing, reiki, and being a huge bitch. She had a little mini-following of very milquetoast hippies that reminded him of the Manson family, only way lamer and with infinitely less drugs.

“It’s been on and off for a while now…I never know what’s up with her. She really messes with my head.” Luckily, they switched the pads before Hardwon embarrassed himself. He prepared himself to throw some amazing romantic advice at his friend along with a few of his famous uppercuts.

“Ulfgar, man, what you gotta do is play hard to get. Just be chill. Leave her texts alone for an hour or two. Don’t call her when you’re drunk. That type of thing.”

“And how’s that gonna work?”

“She’ll start to miss you, bro.”

Ulgar’s eyebrows furrowed thoughtfully, which did not happen very often. “I dunno. Alanis is really smart.”

Just then, Hardwon’s phone rang for the fourth time in an hour. He huffed in annoyance, dropping out of his boxing stance to dig the stupid thing out of his pocket. “Hang on a sec. This number keeps calling me. Who the hell is this?”

“It’s Jaina.”

*

They met up in a bar.

They sat at a rickety old table, the only two people in the whole joint besides the bartender, two untouched glasses of whiskey in front of them. Jaina seemed shell-shocked; her eyes were puffy and red, her hair was shoved under a baseball cap, and she was still wearing her pajamas under her jacket. Hardwon couldn’t ever remember seeing her cry before, not even when they’d been kids. She had always seemed invincible to him.

“She just took a bunch of pills,” she said, her voice hoarse. “At the hospital they said it could have been an accidental OD, but I know Gemma. Nothing she did was ever an accident.”

“Jesus, Jaina.” He felt numb all over. Jaina met his eyes with her dark, glassy gaze.

“This is our dad’s fucking fault.” There was a long pause. Hardwon didn’t know what to say. Wilhelm Bronzebeard was a lot of things—a mean bastard, a criminal, and a control freak, to name a few—but he wasn’t sure how that made him culpable.

“What do you mean? I _know_ he’s an asshole, but…”

She shook her head, her lip trembling in grief or fury or both. “You don’t know the half of it. I moved out of his house when Gemma was a freshman. I was always the one who fought back. After I was gone, I think he did some truly unthinkable shit to her. My whole life, he treated me like the son he never had, but he was always different with Gemma. He treated her like a little doll. The way he was possessive of her…I wouldn’t put anything past that son of a bitch.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks angrily. “I wanted to take her with me when I left, but nobody’s going to give an eighteen-year-old custody of her fourteen-year-old sister. I tried to go back and visit, but dad would never let me see her. I didn’t get to talk one-on-one with her again until she was in college.”

Hardwon felt nauseous. He thought about all the nights he and Gemma had spent in the old middle school, abandoned by the city and slated for a demolition that never came, a favorite haven of local teen shitheads who liked to drink and fuck on the dusty old desks. Her dad wouldn’t let him in the house, and wherever he was staying was always terrible, so they had snuck out to meet up. Mostly, they had talked, trading swigs from stolen bottles of liquor and making plans for the future. They were going to get out of the town they’d grown up in. Right after graduation, they decided, just hop in the car and drive. Change their names and get famous.

At school, everyone had thought Gemma was perfect; she was beautiful, she was smart, she was the head cheerleader, and the other girls in the school did whatever she said without question. He had seen another side of her, not that he had been smart enough to understand much of what he was seeing. After dark, sitting cross-legged on the dusty old teacher’s desk across from him, brandishing a half-empty bottle of gin like a weapon, Gemma had lost her signature searing confidence. She had seemed lost and scared and younger than her seventeen years. It had never even crossed his stupid, drunk teenage mind to ask her what was wrong. 

“She never said anything. I would have helped her.”

Jaina snorted. “What would you have done, Hardwon? You were a foster kid. My dad has more money in his savings account alone than you’ll see in your lifetime. She never would have told you, anyway. She never would have told anyone. She cared too much about what people thought of her.” She paused to knock back her drink. “I think she rushed into marrying Gerard so quick because she thought it would change something. Maybe she thought it would make her feel…safer. I don’t fucking know. Guess it didn’t work.”

“She seemed okay at the wedding.” It fell flat even as he said it. Jaina fixed him with another of those steely looks. 

“Yeah, well. My sister was a really, really good liar.”

*

Hardwon went straight to a bar called The Red Fen. Scarlet Montgomery could always be found in the same booth any night of the week, smiling and smug and sultry, taking cash for any poison you pleased. Within the hour, they were both coked up, dancing, and making out very aggressively. Feeling absolutely nothing. Scarlet was three things, as far as Hardwon knew: one, a skeevy drug dealer, two, beautiful in the way that action movie villains are beautiful, and three, a major biter. More often than not, she drew blood. Luckily, cocaine tended to numb you pretty thoroughly, so when she inevitably took a good chomp at your lip or your neck, it wasn’t nearly as off-putting as it could have been.

He made the mistake of grabbing her ass a little too roughly, and before he knew it, he was in a fistfight with her creepy twin brother. He hadn’t even seen the guy coming; one minute, he was necking with Scarlet on the dance floor, the next, someone had sucker-punched him in the back of the head. He immediately whirled around and clocked the smarmy little fucker in the jaw, which sent him stumbling. The patrons of the Red Fen cleared out of their path as they brawled, hooting and hollering. It was not the type of bar you got kicked out of for fighting.

Waylon managed to jab him pretty good in the gut, but there was really very little any one person could do against a pissed off Hardwon Surefoot hyped up on stimulants. It didn’t take long for him to get the other dude in an inescapable headlock and hold him there until he tapped out. Fighting felt good. The surge of adrenaline and rage and satisfaction when flesh met bone met flesh overpowered everything else for a few blinding moments. It wasn’t advisable, and it wasn’t sustainable, but it was worth it.

After he left Scarlet there to manage her brother’s considerable head trauma, he hit up a few other bars, trying to get the bad taste out of his mouth and the dark cloud away from his head. He considered just going until he passed out wherever he ended up, but his friends would be worried if he didn’t turn up, so he staggered home after a while.

When he opened the front door, he immediately stopped short, blinking at the scene in front of him. Bev was making out with some dude who was definitely not his boyfriend on the couch. He jumped back at the sound of the door opening, and the other guy turned to look over his shoulder. He was clearly a lot older than Bev, somewhere between clean-cut and goth. He did not look in the least concerned about having been caught red-handed.

“This is, uh, one of my roommates,” Bev said, breaking the awkward silence.

“Nice to meet you,” the guy said, smiling congenially. Hardwon did not respond. “I’m Akarot,” the guy said. Hardwon kept staring at him blankly. “I’ll just…get going then. I’ll see you?”

“Yeah. See you.” The guy brushed past Hardwon at the doorway. Bev crossed his arms over his chest like a kid who had been caught playing video games past curfew.

“Are you high?” he asked. He had a huge hickey right under his jaw. 

“Lil’ bit.” Hardwon sat down heavily on the couch beside his friend. “Were you just sucking face with some Morrissey-looking motherfucker?”

“Lil’ bit.” 

Hardwon nodded, mulling over the situation. “Is Moonshine here?”

“No. She left a couple hours ago.”

He breathed out. “Good. We are never telling her about any of this.”

They shook on it.

**Author's Note:**

> I do need to shout out trebleDeath for their comment on "Daisy Chains," which originally gave me the idea to take the story in this (sad) but hopefully interesting direction!


End file.
